This isn't a column about soccer, (or football, as some people call it, or Association Football, as hardly anybody calls it anymore), although it contains gratuitous references to Eamon Dunphy, Stephen Hunt and Giovanni Trapattoni. Neither is it about pest control, though skinny little rats feature prominently. It is, rather, an opinion column about opinions, about the need for them, the point of them, the use of them and the importance of them. It is about the people who hold them, and how they express them. And it is about the people who hear them and how they react.

The starting point for the debate, as he so often is, is Eamon Dunphy, whose outburst on television last Saturday, in the wake of Ireland's 2-2 draw with Italy, provoked more reaction than any other Dunphy ejaculation since he tossed his pen across the RTE studio following a match against Egypt during the 1990 World Cup.

In my mind's eye, I can still that pen in mid-flight, although I'm sure the image wasn't as clear to the time. I date my affection for Dunphy as a polemicist to that moment. In the middle of the national hysteria about Ireland's first appearance at a World Cup, he had the courage to say: "This team we fawn over is dull, playing below its potential, and nothing to get excited about if you prefer good football to swaying drunkenly in front of a big screen, braying Olé Olé". It was a deeply unpopular stance, but Dunphy had a valid argument. If he appeared to overstate his case, perhaps that was necessary to be heard over the howls of hostility.

Last week, he was at it again, describing the Irish performance against the Italians as a "travesty, a terrible performance, shameful. (He later backtracked on "shameful"). The reaction was immediate. Columnists – Dunphy's dreaded decentskins – fell over themselves to condemn him. Trapattoni wondered who this person was who presumed to criticise his unbeaten heroes. Somebody suggested Dunphy was destabilising the Irish team. One of the players, Stephen Hunt, described Dunphy as a "skinny little rat". He went on: "There are two or three people who say stuff, just say it for the sake of saying it, to be the bad cop. What's the point in that? To get a higher salary in RTE or wherever they come from?"

Hunt spoke for many people who believe instinctively that anybody who has a strong opinion, or an unpopular opinion, and who expresses it forcefully must in some way be faking it. To these people it's all done for effect, to achieve fame or notoriety or to earn more money. Why otherwise would somebody want to rock the boat, and be so negative, when the opportunity is available to get on board with the consensus view?

There is an argument, of course, that it was the consensus view, and the failure to challenge it, that led us to the economic mess that we are in today. To this way of thinking, the consensus should always be opposed, if only to prevent its champions from becoming smug and lazy in their certainty. A bit more scepticism when were being constantly told during the Celtic Badger era that we were the best little nation in the world might have slowed down or stopped the journey to depression on which we have so recently embarked.

To challenge the consensus view is not the negative stance Stephen Hunt and others believe it is. In fact, it often comes from an unusually positive view of life. Dunphy, as he did in 1990, genuinely believes that this team of players (with one or two added) is better than its recent performances or string of drawn games suggests. He genuinely believes that with a bit more belief, a bit more Irish impertinence, valour and swagger, this team could realistically aspire to win qualifying groups instead of being happy with second place. (Likewise with journalists who bang on about politicians' expenses; they are not always motivated by a negative view of politics and its practitioners, but by the positive belief that democracy deserves better than the freeloading halfwits who make up the majority of Dáil Eireann currently).

So fault Dunphy for his idealism, if you must, but spare him from accusations that he's only in it for the money or the infamy. Two decades of that kind of criticism have only strengthened him in his determination to question what he sees as lazy thinking. Stephen Hunt mightn't agree, but debate in Ireland is better for it.

Harsh judgment: Don't make teenage sex a crime

Last week's decision by Judge John Neilan to give a prison sentence to a man for having sex with a 16-year-old girl when he was 19 seems like an over-reaction. The couple had a pre-existing relationship, the intercourse was consensual and the accused did not know that 17 was the age of consent; indeed evidence was given in court of a "very widely held belief" in Ireland that the age of consent is 16.

We might all wish that our 16-year-old daughters or sisters were not having sex with their teenage boyfriends, but jailing the boyfriend is an excessive response to something that is happening every day.

Although Neilan put the sentence in place now, he adjourned the case until January to allow for victim-impact and probation reports to be prepared. Hopefully, they will convince him that the sentence should be overturned.

ddoyle@tribune.ie